Michal Schulz has advanced the Pegasos/PPC native port: working bootup.resource,
partially written openfirmware.resource, full exec.library, full oop.library
(though some conflicts remain with kernel.resource), partial kernel.resource
(external interrupts are not handled at the moment, and thus the scheduler
doesn't have a timer which could feed it). Unfortunately he won't be able
to work much on AROS during the next few months.

Sebastian Heutling has worked on the Linux/PPC hosted port, up to the point
where AROS can be nearly built out of the box, except for a couple of
math libraries.

Fabio Alemagna did it! After a month of hard work to improve our C library
(POSIX semantics handling) and to port the huge beast known as GCC, we
now have a working port of GCC 3.3.1. Thanks to TeamAROS and to the
donors, Fabio won a deserved bounty.
No more excuses to not port your Amiga programs to AROS, be them coded
in C or C++ :) Help with ports of various *nix utilities is also welcome.

The next goal? Probably to have a POSIX environment complete enough to be able
to recompile GCC within AROS itself.

TeamAROS showed to be a great success, many bounties have been successfully completed
and more are waiting to be picked up. Be sure to check their page out and see if there's
any bounties you'd like to donate to, or even start a bounty of your own!

Martin Steigerwald wrote an article about AROS for the German publication
Amiga-Magazin. Thanks Martin !

While I'm there, AROS automated builds were often missing during
the past month, due to a bug (not AROS-related) in binutils which prevented
the native version to link properly, and then due to changes in our libc.
However these particular issues are now solved !

I was going to begin by "In these hot summer days" but as we have people
from both hemispheres it doesn't apply :-) Anyway, we are still busy
coding, just take a look at the CVS commits. And it's more than enough time
for a status update !

Michal Schulz is still working on the PPC port, having received the Pegasos
board donated by Genesi, and more recently a Voodoo3 card donated by
Randy Vice.

Johan Grip is implementing the OpenPCI specification, and also reworking
our buggy ide.device, which attempts to write too much data at once instead
of splitting the requests in smaller chunks. However this is going to be
more a rewrite than a bug fix. If someone just wants to do the bug fix,
there is an open bounty (currently 40 USD) for the ide.device bug
at TeamAROS.

GCC 3.2 is now the minimum requirement to compile AROS, which now compiles
fine with GCC 3.3, thanks to Stefan Reinauer and others who fixed the
various deprecated bits in the tree.

Staf Verhaegen continued to improve and simplify the build system. Lately,
he reorganized the kernel build to use only objects, no more static or
shared libraries.

Iain Templeton, one of our South hemisphere developers, did his fair share
on the build system too, especially on the configure scripts (which now
require autoconf 2.53, hopefully a generated configure is kept in CVS
for those missing it) and to ensure that AROS compiles and runs fine
hosted on FreeBSD.

Also mawk (which comes as default on Debian GNU/Linux) will generate
incorrect headers while building AROS, but GNU awk (gawk) and FreeBSD awk
work fine.

John Gustafsson and Adam Chodorowski earned the first TeamAROS bounty
for their "Automated Disk Prep and OS Installer". It will install
AROS on the first disk of the first IDE channel. Don't try this on
a disk with valuable data anywhere on it, you've been warned.
Unfortunately it isn't fully usable yet, due to the ide.device bug:
some files get corrupted during installation.

As part of this work, new Format and Partition commands were implemented.

We now have a beautiful About dialog, thanks to Pixel Art's logo
and Adam for the code, as well as an in-progress Mesa port by Nic Andrews.
And before you ask, the beautiful Broken.miho wallpaper is here.

Adam did major improvements to the workbench and icon libraries
(which handle much of the "under the hood" desktop work),
and also to Wanderer itself. The framework for Wanderer commands
is in place, and there is already the Delete tool implemented.

As a bonus, there is now an identification hook in icon.library
to display proper icons depending on the file type and take
appropriate action on double-click, for files without disk icons.

Sebastian Bauer added arbitrary angled gradients to Zune images.

David Le Corfec, Adam and especially Fabio Alemagna,
who came up with a multitude of ideas and algorithms, brainstormed
on a "perfectly" MUI-compliant implementation of Zune layout algorithm.
Hopefully the new one seems to do the trick.

The Zune string gadget also got a rework and is now slightly more usable,
the prefs program got a few more pages, and many Zune classes were
put in their own loadable modules.

Georg Steger implemented the Cybergraphics' WritePixelArrayAlpha()
and BltTemplateAlpha(), so we can show even more eye-candy, with
alpha blending this time :)
Adam used this to implement a nice grayed-out disabled effect for
Zune gadgets, instead of the usual grid pattern.

Georg is also porting back the intuition.library from MorphOS, and
still does a lot of impressive bug finding and fixing elsewhere, which for
example led to find and report an longstanding bug in stipple drawing
to the XFree86 project. And when you're faced with a strange memory
corruption, try his invaluable trick : call a check routine in the
scheduler ! This allowed to fix bugs in several Prefs programs.

But maybe the best for the end ... With BltTemplateAlpha()
to blend the anti-aliased glyphs, and the work from Staf on freetype2,
diskfont and bullet libraries, TrueType fonts now
work - and look - great! It also draws upon the work of many others,
including the MorphOS team (and especially Emmanuel Lesueur) and
the FreeType project. The Bitstream Vera font family is now included
in AROS.

Use FTManager to install TrueType fonts in a few mouse clicks, and enjoy
the new Font Prefs program.

We got a Spanish keymap contributed by Albert Astals Cid, several French
catalogs by Olivier Adam and Hungarian catalogs, language and country
files by Mark "Bôregér" Balogh.

The applications localization system has been cleaned up a bit, and as
a side effect, much more applications are now localized.
So if your favorite application has been localized but misses a catalog
for your language, don't hesitate to send it to us!

Will be available next week. Nah, just kidding ;-)
One of the most requested features. A couple of people are working
part-time on this, so don't hold your breath.
This is a huge task, spanning from low-level drivers to interface libraries
and support applications. It's currently not the priority for most of the
developers. Use another network appliance in the meantime, or come join us :)

A little over a month ago we announced a contest to find a shining new
logotype to match our mascot. The deadline is now up, and we have received
several very nice contributions! This means it's time for you to go to the
logotype contest gallery and vote for the logotype you think AROS should
use!

Choose wisely...

Huomautus

You can only vote for a single logotype, and your choice is irreversible.
Once you've clicked on the "I vote for this logotype" button, there is no
way to undo your choice. So please take some time and think it through.
All votes are logged on IP address.

Another whole month has gone by, which means that it's definitely time for
another status update. Doh, why do have all the status updates to begin
like that? :) I'd like to thank all the people who showed interest in AROS
in the last months, and there have been a lot ! Anyway, let's not wait longer,
here are the juicy bits, in this relatively uneventful month ...

Johan Grip received the Pegasos board at the end of April, installed Debian
GNU/Linux on it, and started working on the hosted AROS port. However he was
no longer able to continue for personal reasons, so he sent the board to
Michal Schulz, another talented hardware hacker.

In the meantime, Michal, who already had a PPC PReP board, worked on the native
PPC port. He merged his sources in the AROS CVS tree, creating the new
'arch/ppc' directory. To this day, he went as far as implementing task handling
and scheduling. Congratulations Michal! Sources as well as a PReP boot image
can be found at http://home.tu-clausthal.de/~misc/AROS.ppc.tar.bz2

Michal is also reworking exec.library to make it hardware/platform-independent,
by moving dependent stuff in resources like kernel.resource, OpenFirmware.resource ...

No fundamental changes to this sometimes hated system, but lots and
lots of little bug fixes and improvements by almost every active AROS Team
member in tools, config files, makefiles ... So much activity caused quite
a few broken nightly builds, but it seems now stabilized.

Also the newer gcc 3.3 that got installed on the build machine led to some
problems, but nothing that couldn't be handled.

We now use bzip2 instead of gzip, and a custom, simpler package format than
tar to create the AROS floppy and squeeze every possible byte. In the quest
to more space, some less useful programs were removed from floppy. Thanks
to Adam Chodorowski for the cleanup and optimizations!

The installer for the i386 native port, install-i386-pc, is currently broken,
but a graphical bootsector installer is in work, as well as a bootmenu editor,
courtesy of Sebastian Heutling, who also still works on the HDToolBox partition
editor.

Georg Steger worked on the unix hosted kernel to allow nesting supervisor,
so that signals occuring during a signal handler execution are not ignored.
It should improve the stability of the serial device.

and of course, lots of fixes here and there by many developers : for a rough
idea, already more than 350 CVS commits this month (although we won't beat
the record of 890 last month, according to the AROS-CVS mailing list
archive).

AROS needs a new and great-looking logotype to match our mascot. We need
your help, so this is your chance to change the face of AROS! We are holding
a logotype contest where anyone is free to enter. We will hold a public voting
for the best logotype once the deadline is up. All valid contributions will
be displayed, and you can vote for your favorite logo.

I have two months of free time this summer, which I would love to spend on
coding on AROS. The problem is that I have to pay my bills, and therefore I
would need to get some temporary job. This, of course, means there would be
very little time to code on AROS... :-/

This also brings a perfect opportunity for YOU to support your favourite
operating system! The idea is that someone or some group of people sponsor me
for working on AROS. I don't ask for much money, just enough to pay my bills
and buy food. For 600 EUR I can work more than fulltime (60 hours/week) for
a whole month, on anything YOU (the sponsor) wants me too.

Matthew Parsons contacted Genesi and asked if they would be interested in
sponsoring a Pegasos board to get AROS ported to it, and they thought it was a
great idea! After some discussion on the ML and hard thinking on Johan Grip's
part, he decided to accept the offer and try his utmost to port AROS to the
Pegasos. All agree that he's the best suited for this task. The Pegasos board
is at the time of writing on it's way to Johan. Hopefully this will result in
AROS running on it in the near future!

Stefan Berger did some more work on the m68k-pp (Palm) port, which include
bits of an input driver for the touchscreen and several fixes. He also
committed parts of a native ARM port (it's not complete, and there are no
promises that he will continue working on it).

Georg Steger has worked hard on improving the stability in ide.device and
cdrom.handler. The former had several ugly race conditions, which could
result in bad things happening if several programs tried to access the disk
at the same time. Also added was better support for removable drives. As for
cdrom.handler, there were several bugs in the startup routines and the
filesystem interface (which meant PROGDIR: didn't work for programs
started from CDROM).

Sebastian Heutling commited parts of a USB/UHCI driver, but it is far from
being usable at this point. Before it makes sense to develop it further more
work has to be done on the general driver architecture in AROS.

Martin Blom found some free time and ported AHI, although there are no
drivers yet (except for the filesave and dummy ones). This is a great step
forward for providing sound support to AROS! Writing a driver for hosted
should be fairly simple (the only problem is time, as always) and it will
probably the first one. You can see the preferences program running in a
screenshot.

On the user interface front, there has been discussions about using
render.library and guigfx.library in Zune, picture.datatype and other places
that would benefit greatly from them. The author was very positive to this,
and render.library already has been ported long ago (although it has some
endianness issues).

There was also a heated discussion on the mailing list about which buttons
should be available in prefs programs, since there was a feeling that the
traditional Save/Use/Cancel triad of AmigaOS is not enough. After a lot of
discussion, it was finally decided on a compromise where the Save/Use/Cancel
buttons where kept but the additional Test/Revert buttons (which don't close
the window) was added.

Other developments of interest:

David Le Corfec, Georg Steger and Sebastian Bauer continued to code on Zune
and made the Test button in the prefs program work, added a bitmap preview
in the imageadjust dialog and worked on a experimental feature to reduce
the flickering when resizing windows.

David Le Corfec managed to dig up some artistic skills and created some new
def_Tool and def_Project icons to replace the 4-color ones. Some days later,
Martin "Mason" Mertz contributed several more icons, including ones for
def_Tool and def_Project. ;-) Some nice striped patterns were also created
by David. Have a look at the screenshot.

Georg Steger fixed a bug in the hosted flavour which meant that the X SHM
extension always was disabled. The graphics performance should now be a bit
better.

Thanks to Martin Gierich who wrote jpeg.datatype based on libjpeg and
Georg Steger who wrote png.datatype based on libpng, AROS now supports most
popular image formats! The png.datatype supports transparency with indexed
(256 colors or less) images. You can see them in action in the screenshot.

Staf Verhaegen merged the diskfont.library sources with the MorphOS version,
and then continued with reworking it in several ways.

Georg Steger fixed a bug in Locale Prefs which caused random crashes on
i386-pc (but oddly enough not on hosted).

Fabio Alemagna fixed several bugs all over the place, after Martin Blom
reported them during the course of porting AHI.

Stefan Berger worked some more on the port of gtlayout.library in contrib,
aiming on being able to port Term in the future. He also ported another
contrib program: MUImine (a rather nice minesweeper game clone).

Fabio Alemagna ported LBreakout 2, which is a very nice and polished
breakout style game that uses SDL. There are however some problems when
running in windowed mode or in 16bit screen depth (works fine in 24bit modes
though). Take a look at the screenshot!

During the last month there has also been an effort to clean up the CVS
repository, mostly spear-headed by Adam Chodorowski. Basically there are two
parts to this effort:

Make sure that all software in the main tree follows the
licensing policy (which entails checking the copyright and making sure
the license are compatible with the APL, and make sure it is documented).

Moving software that we want to be part of the standard AROS distribution
from contrib to the main tree, and moving things that don't belong in the
main tree to contrib.

The following things have resulted from this effort:

The authors of FlexCat, which we use in development, have been contacted to
clarify the license since the documentation is very vague about it. They
confirmed that it is indeed licensed under the
GNU General Public License (GPL).

GRUB (our bootloader for i386-pc), libjpeg, jpeg.datatype, libbz2 (bzip2
compression library) and JanoEditor (nice text editor which will become the
standard one in AROS) have been moved from contrib to the main tree. On the
other hand, liblcc (part of the LCC compiler) has been moved from the main
tree to contrib. Aaron Digulla did the actual moving directly on the CVS
server, to avoid loosing the CVS history.

In the near future more software will most likely be moved to the main
tree, like Regina (to provide ARexx compatibility), FreeType 2 (support
for scalable TrueType fonts), libpng and png.datatype.

After a consensus had been reached in the discussion about buttons in prefs
programs, Adam Chodorowski decided to write the first part of the AROS User
Interface Style Guide about this topic. It's still a long way from being
a comprehensive guide on user interface issues, but at least it's a start.

Let's begin with what you can see right now: the new site. As already announced a few
days ago, AROS has gained a new and awesome web site, thanks to Adam Chodorowski and
Daniel Holmen. The new site has a set of nice features which make it easier to navigate
and get the informations one is looking for.

In a not particular order, the new site features:

new and updated documentation, which should greatly help people understand what AROS is
really about (believe me, there's a widespread general misconception about this issue)
and provide with useful references about developmentfor AROS and of AROS itself,
together with information more geared towards users.

a much better download section, from which nightly builds and CVS snapshots
of the AROS sources can be downloaded.

On the Graphic User Interface front there have also been many improvements.

Zune [1], for instance, has been greatly improved, and its skinning features are
just brilliant. Have a look at the screenshots page to get an idea of what
I'm talking about.

freetype 2 has been ported to AROS, by Staf Verhaegen, on the basis of the work already
done by the MOS Team.

Wanderer [2], while still being mostly experimental, has finally got smooth window scrolling,
which should improve its usability a lot. It must be said, though, that the current Wanderer
was meant to be more a proof of concept than anything, and apart from the initial development,
which lasted only a couple of days, not much has been done about it. A more powerful incarnation
of the Wanderer concept is in the work by Paul Smith.

Many more Mason Icons have been included in the AROS builds, making the overall wanderer
experience more pleasant. Many thanks go to Martin "Mason" Mertz for providing us with his
excellent work!

There are news also from the device drivers front, thanks to Johan Grip.

The ide.device has finally seen solved the geometry recognition issue:
now it should be able to detect the geometry of your hardrive correctly in all cases.
Unfortunately, what seems to be an easy job at a glance, shows to be a dirty one when
looking at it more deeply, due to problems related to CHS/LBA representation.
Or so Johan says. :-)

We've got a VESA2 driver, which makes it possible to use high resolutions and high depth values
in the native flavour of AROS. Georg Steger has, moreover, optimized the drawing routines
a lot, making the whole experience of using AROS at full resolution and full depth a very
pleasant one. Try it by yourself, by running a few demos.

AROS doesn't have a wide set of applications yet, however it has a few cute ones, and some of them
have seen great improvements during the last months.

HDToolBox [3] has seen many bugs fixed and its GUI improved. For the ones that
don't know yet, thanks to the partition.library [4], HDToolBox handles both RDB and MBR
partitioning models, and it allows for nested partitions, even of different models.

Staf Verhaegen has managed to port Regina, a free and portable REXX interpreter, to AROS,
making it fully compatible with AREXX.

The AROS port of python, maintained by Adam Chodorowski, has a site of its own now,
and got the name of PyAROS.

A lot more things have been improved in AROS in the latest months and many bugs have been fixed, in
many modules, so it would be rather hard listing all of them. However, there are a few things really worth
mentioning which don't fit in any specific category and which I am going to list here.

The ELF [5] loader has been completely refactored, all of its bugs are now gone and it's
significantly faster and cleaner. AROS has also obtained official recognition by the SCO
group, and thus got an official ELFOSABI [6] number: 15.

The ELF loader is a work of Fabio Alemagna.

Martin Gierich has continued his work on the picture.datatype, after a very long pause,
and made it finally handle true color pictures. He also updated the ilbm datatype
accordingly.

Always on the datatypes front, Daniel Holmen has developed a bmp datatype. However,
when the bmp datatype was made Martin hadn't updated the picture datatype yet, so
the bmp datatype doesn't handle true color pictures.

The FreeBSD port is now working, after a long period of time during which AROS would
not compile or would not work properly on FreeBSD. Thanks to Iain Templeton for fixing it
and Georg Steger for doing his usual bug hunting. :)

Fabio Alemagna has begun working on an SDK for AROS, including a set of cross and native development
tools, with specific AROS optimizations. So far the cross-binutils are almost ready, and patches
have already been submitted to the binutils crew, expect an AROS SDK to be released to the public
soon.

Although in the past months we've been really silent, development has continued without interruption.
However, progress is not as fast as we all would like it to be, and this is mainly due to lack of
developers: "AROS - So much to do, so little time" is the motto that has been invented in the
#aros IRC channel on freenode to describe this situation. :-)

So, as we always say, we need more developers! Come on guys, AROS is fun, let's have fun together!

Partition.library is a library which handles different partitioning models in an unified way.
So far it supports RDB and MBR partitioning models, but it is made to be easily extended.
Partition.library is a work of Sebastian Heutling.

The ELFOSABI is a number that uniquely identifies an operating system and connects it to
a particular ELF object. In other words, an ELF object which has in its header a particular
ELFOSABI number, is meant to be run only on the operating system which owns that number.

As you've probably noticed by now, we have a brand new web site up and running.
The design is brand new and most of the docs have been updated (though some
are still quite outdated unfortunately).

We hope you like the new site as much as we do! Enjoy :)

This has been a huge amount of work for the people involved, and a HUGE thanks
must go to Adam Chodorowski for actually reading through and converting all
the old docs! The site structure was planned by Adam Chodorowski and Daniel
Holmen, and implemented by Adam. The graphic design and layout of the site
was done by Daniel Holmen.

Thanks also go to the rest of the AROS Development Team, as about half of them
have been involved in the site restructuring in some way or another.

And while we're at it, we also have some new discussion forums online!
Visit them, and leave your comments about AROS there.